I’ve sort of become addicted to old time radio (OTR) detective dramas–e.g. Dragnet, Philip Marlowe, Johnny Dollar and so on. On several occasions, it seems that the bad guy might have fled the country, so they call the airport to inquire about flights. In a similar way, characters sometimes call the airport to make flight reservations for themselves.
This seems odd. Was it ever the case that you called the airport with either of these objectives in mind?
Just how young are you?
I remember doing just that back before things got automated. You wanted a flight and didn’t want to use a travel agent, you called the airport. The operator would connect you to the counter of whatever airline you wanted and you would ask your questions and book your flight. You reserved your seat and ordered your meal at the same time.
Not odd at all. In the days before the Internet and 800 numbers, you called the airline’s local ticket office if they had one in your city. If they didn’t have a local ticket office, you called the airline at their check-in counter. How else could you find information?
Even as late as the 1960’s, my father (a traveling salesman) would go to the airport and make a bunch of flight reservations for the next month or so directly with a ticket agent rather than sitting on hold on the telephone.
Pre-internet, you did business over the phone or in person. If you wanted a flight from your local airport, you called that airport.
I think the OP might be wondering why you’d call the airport, rather than an airline or travel agent.
Could the OP be asking “why Havana”?
Calling an airline would have been unusual - like calling Samsung to buy a television.
A lot of people did buy tickets through a travel agent - at one time that was the typical way to buy tickets. But travel agents were only available during regular business hours. If you needed a last minute flight out of town, like the OP described, you had to call the airport.
Perhaps there was only one airline at the airport that might fly to Havana? Or perhaps you called a central number, they looked at that night’s schedule, saw that United/Pan Am/TWA has a flight to Havana for tonight, and transferred you to that airline’s ticket sales desk.
In radio days, the number of airlines flying to a location was often small. International flights were parceled out among airlines so only one or two might serve a particular route.
And I agree that calling the airport directly was the best way to handle this. International flights were limited by customs needs, so all of them would be bunched together and one call would get information on them all.
Yes, like an information desk that could transfer you to someone that can help you. It is weird how technology has made these concepts foreign to so many people so quickly. There isn’t anything that unusual about it even today. Let’s say you want to take a train or bus from Boston to New York tonight. Who would you contact if you were right near the station and didn’t have access to a computer? I have no idea because I have never needed to do that but calling the station directly would be a top guess. I am sure you can do that with smaller airlines like Cape Air even today and it still may even work for the larger airlines. They might transfer you to a central reservations number now but things didn’t used to be nearly as centralized and they aren’t strictly so even today.
You can walk into any airport right now and buy a ticket in person to wherever they happen to be going in the next few hours. It will probably cost you plenty and you may arouse some suspicion post 9/11 but you can do it. I don’t see a reason why you can’t do the same thing over the phone or why that would have been unusual at all back when security was almost non-existent and ticketing was paper based and far from centralized (that was all the way through the 1990’s for the paper based ticketing; your ticket was more like a concert ticket, not an electronic receipt).
Travel agents were used if you were planning a trip, since they could shop around and get the best rates. But if you wanted to leave immediately, the airport is a better bet. IIRC, they didn’t have the equivalent of a “will call” window: if the travel agent bought the ticket, it would be couriered to their office (or just mailed). Too time-consuming if you’re in a hurry.
The airport would the the only place to get a record of all flights. Each carrier would have their own schedules, but unless you knew who was flying to Havana that night off hand, they didn’t help. Calling the main information desk would get in touch with someone who had a list of everything.
Travel agents also charged a markup. If you shopped around the airlines yourself, you could find the best rate and not have to pay an agent, but it took some calling to do it.
We would actually go to the airport to buy our tickets. Shopping around was not an option. There were only a few carriers who went to specific places. Want to go to Denver? - Frontier. New York? - TWA. (Guess where we were.) the advantage of going directly to the airport is that you could look over flight availability without spending a lot of time on hold on the phone. You couldn’t buy them over the phone in any case. You had to go to the airport to pay for them
Havana is awesome, and I cannot wait until the US normalizes relations with Cuba so I no longer have to pretend I am Canadian?
{SECRET MESSAGE}THE BLUE OWL HOOTS AT THE BROWN HOUSE—REPEAT—THE BLUE OWL HOOTS AT THE BROWN HOUSE—END MESSAGE{/SECRET MESSAGE}
Fidel wanted me to pass that on to you.
I was under the impression that at the time agents would not charge a mark-up, but rather would get commission from the airline off the top, with the actual cash-out-of-pocket remaining the same (for same booking type, of course), fares being federally regulated.
I think at one time that was the case, then the airlines stopped paying agents (or discounting tickets thru them), so the agents were forced to charge customers. It was the death knell for agents.
Right, but that happened well after deregulation – so in the time of the OP reference the agent would be the same price. The advantage in calling the airport as mentioned was immediate information as to whether there was a flight to Havana and with what company… However, it’s true that speaking directly to the counter agent at the airport or the downtown desk could help get you the really good tickets they’d keep for special cases
According to Wikipedia, airlines stopped commissions about ten years ago.
But that wouldn’t be true for the era we’re talking about.
I don’t want to sidetrack the thread but how do you pretend to be Canadian during international travel?